I've been meaning to post this for sometime and having read through the posts on here, it seems that some folks might get something out of my experience with marketing my blog. Please don't think that by 'marketing' I mean advertising, monetising or otherwise using a transaction to promote your blog, I don't. You'll see what I mean.

First a little background. I'm addicted to twitter, and most social media to be honest. When I first joined twitter I didn't think that there would be a Warcraft presence. How naive! I started following a few people and soon discovered the blog community which in time led to me beginning my own blog about adventures in Azeroth. Over the last few months I've managed to gather a respectable and consistent readership, so I thought I'd share with everyone else how I've done it. Step 1 - TwitterGet a twitter account, if you don't already have one. Set up as your character if you wish. You can see mine at twitter.com/demeternoth and you'll also see all the people I follow and find some great Warcraft bloggers in there.

Search for #warcraft and you will see a raft of people pop up in your results who are talking about Warcraft. Follow them. You don't have to say anything to them, but start listening to what they are saying and when you're comfortable join in the conversation. You'll find that you'll only gain your own followers by tweeting good quality stuff, think of it as an extension of your blog, you want people to trust you and want to follow you right? In time they'll know you and you can talk less about warcraft stuff should you choose to. You'll also find a lovely community of people who are extremely supportive and helpful.

Tweet about your blog. If you are brand new, say so! You'll be amazed how people are happy to promote you with retweets, make sure you reciprocate when they post about their blog too.

If you don't have a twitter feed on your blog, it might be worth adding it. It's a personal choice but for me it's just another visual way of telling people I'm on twitter and I tweet quite a bit about this great game I love. Step 2 - AnalyticsGet some analytics on your blog. This isn't complicated and gives you so much information about where your traffic is coming from you'd be mad not to have some. On the Blogger platform it's as easy as copying and pasting a line of code from Google. Believe me, if I can do it, you can.

After a week or so, you'll be able to start looking at your analytics and you'll see where on the internet your readers are coming to you from, what pages they look at most, how long they stay on the site and where they are geographically in the world. I'm British, but thanks to the power of Twitter and the US blogging crew, I know that the majority of my readers come from the USA. This could help me make choices about what or how I write. It also tells me what my best ranked post has been. If your blog is class specific, like mine, if you haven't already done a stats guide I'd heartily recommend it. I'd also suggest writing a few posts with your tongue firmly in your cheek, I titled one tanking post "Deme does Crotch Watching". It's ranked 3rd on my most viewed posts. Don't worry about the amount of time people spend on the site, you'll be crawled by all the google/yahoo/bing bots which won't spend too long. You want a consistent number of visits and a steady growth in new readers. If you get that wow.com link, this is where you'll see the spike as your blog gets hit

Step 3Subscribe to other blogs. I don't mean Warcraft blogs, you should be doing that anyway, I mean copy-writer blogs, blogs about blogging, blogs about social media marketing. http://menwithpens.ca/ is definitely worth a look as is http://www.copyblogger.com/ and I'd even say http://outspokenmedia.com/blog/ although they are more general about internet marketing they have some awesome social media marketing tips for bloggers.

Step 4Llink your blog in your signature. Everywhere you dare! I post mine on my guild forum and have it on my sig here and on other wow forums I might happen to grace. I'm not brave enough yet to put it on my actual WoW forum signature, but I do know people who do. My guild posts, behind links from here and from twitter are very good at driving traffic to my blog.

Step 5Keep posting! Keep up the posts (and the quality of them), keep people interested and enjoy blogging

Twitter is, thankfully, very forgiving. Its super simple. Follow those you like, type messages in your own twitter for your followers to see.

To write a public message to someone, or to mention them, simply write:

Hey guys, I heard @Qieth is an awesome moonkin!

The @ signifies a twitter name, and the name will be clickable and take you to the other twannel (new word - can it catch on?). You can also use it to simply reply publicly to people with "@Qieth Yes, I think you're quite awesome". Please note that everyone can see these messages.

If you want a private message, use DM (direct message). Example:

DM Qieth Hey man, could you tell me how to be an awesome moonkin?

Only you and the recipient will see that message, but you can only DM people who are following you - this is to avoid spam and the like, im sure.

Lastly, you can tag a message with a topic, using the hash tag. This is used in a wariety of different ways. An example from how I use them is:

I tag it with #druid, #moonkin and #warcraft, because its related. You don't have to tag stuff like "blog", because that word is already used in the sentence. The tag is simply to add more searchable words to your tweet, when the words arent used in the message itself. When people search for "moonkin", it will show both tweets containing "moonkin" but also "#moonkin" In this example, if i had said "Check out my moonkin blog" and nothing more, it would come up on "moonkin" and/or "blog", but not on "druid".

Oh that is so helpful. I am really new to twitter and no idea what I'm doing. I somehow have set it to auto update when I post which I don't know how I did that but it's great. Other than that I'm lost. I started following some wow sites and randomly people follow me too.

If I write @Quieth (for example) does the person it's aimed at get the message if they aren't following me?

Thanks for these tips, I'm going to try and start using Twitter for more than just updating when I post. It seems like a very useful social networking tool.

I love analytics for showing me fun stuff like what search terms have been used to find my blog, believe me you get some really random ones! I'd recommend a good poke around with analytics and have a play.

On each blog post you can put an notation on your analytics, I use this to check which blog post I posted on what date, then I can see which posts are drawing in the most traffic which could also help me plan what I want to write next. I also spend time going through the websites who have sent me traffic. Often this includes other blog sites where I might have commented or the other author has kindly linked to me, this is really helpful in two ways. Number 1, you can go thank the person who linked to you and thus build a better relationship across the blogging community and number 2, you might pick up a blog you didn't know about already and be able to build on the readership you've pulled in from there with a follow-up blog on the same topic.

Honestly, the biggest thrill for me about analytics comes from changing the dates on the dashboard to go right back to the beginning of my blogging history and see the little graph climb and climb. Talk about flashing your epeen. My blog might be small in comparison to some (or most) but it still makes me smile to see that.

Anyway, hope those pointers will give you a bit of a start in analytics, it's a very powerful tool and I think for the most part I just play around with it, in my professional capacity it's utilised much more but that would mean telling you all some state secrets.

Of course, most of the above is at an end for me for the time being due to RL demanding too much tanking and dps for me to spend time in Azeroth or blogging about it. I'm sure I'll return to it one day though.

Something I heartily recommend is a service called dlvr.it. It will watch your blog and do an auto Tweet when you post. This is especially helpful if you schedule blog posts, which I sometimes to do to hit the US readership at their lunch break as you don't need to remember to do it

_________________Evlyxx“When one door closes another door opens; but we often look so long and so regretfully upon the closed door, that we do not see the ones which open"

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